Bident tells us that he suffered from mild tuberculosis ate very little and was known to have had only one rather abstract

Bident tells us that he suffered from mild tuberculosis, ate very little and was known to have had only one rather abstract “liaison” – mainly epistolary – with Denise Rollin, the mistress of his close friend Georges Bataille.A second photograph of Blanchot dates from 1929: a sensitive, intelligent, rather haughty head, still very fin de si?e: he sports a decadently full and negligently tied bow of the fashionable kind of cravat known as a lavalli?.The only other known picture of Blanchot is a snap – one can’t dignify it by the term “photograph” – taken by some ignominious paparazzo for the sensationalising literary magazine Lire in 1985. We see our mysterious author amid the banality of a supermarket parking lot: he is still tall, though bent and frail-looking, as he pushes a shopping cart towards a white Renault 5. Of course, in the days of hand-held cameras photography was not the popular sport it became later but, all the same, only to have been properly photographed twice in one’s long life seems almost like backing into the limelight.The profusion and complexity of Blanchot’s writings make it hard to put one’s finger on him as a man and a writer: perhaps he was in truth writing in order to obliterate his image. He began by writing novels, some of which are now issued in modest paperback editions in France – a transformation he must have surely deplored as an invasion of editorial privacy. These fictions are composed in a lucid, dreamlike prose that soon almost hypnotises the attentive reader, and both characters and situations have a plangent, disquieting irreality that recalls two of his favourite authors, Kafka and Sade, about both of whom he wrote fascinating books. In his De Kafka ?afka (1981) he writes: Kafka often showed that he was a genius of prompt perceptions, capable of conveying the essential in a few swift strokes.

But gradually he imposed upon himself a minuteness, a gradualism of approach, a detailed precision (even in the descriptions of his own dreams) without which man, exiled from reality, is swiftly captured by distraction and the confusions of inexact imagination.In those words, we may have an insight into whatever it may have been that impelled Blanchot into a retreat from the world at large, so diffuse, so uncontrollable, and into the more selective world of his own mind. This reminds us of Milton: For solitude is sometimes best society, And short retirement urges sweet return. .Maurice Blanchot’s retreat from the world may have been the result of a strong reaction against his former right-wing connections in literature and politics, which involved a taint of anti-Semitism before and during the Nazi occupation of France. Yet he was able to hide Levinas’ wife and daughter and he helped clandestines to escape to Switzerland.For a long time after the Second World War he lived (1949 to 1957) a life apart at Eze in the countryside above Nice, where he was often ill.

But then he emerged again into public activity by joining the writers opposed to the war in Algeria. He supported calls from intellectuals to display “a spirit of insubordination” and he took an active part in the student riots of 1968.In later life, Blanchot showed openness of mind (but a certain lack of common sense) in proposing to invite Salman Rushdie to his home to take part in a debate with the Ayatollah Khomeini about the Koran and The Satanic Verses. As late as November 1992, he leapt to the defence of the Syrian poet Faraj Beyrak incarcerated for his “unsuitable” opinions since 1987.But that was the extent of Maurice Blanchot’s “sweet returns” from “short retirement”. He refused to play the media game and loathed television chat shows, where even the audiences of mostly young girls ogle the camera in hopes of being “spotted” and respectable writers lend their person to the press and the camera for easy rewards of money and instant celebrity.”There are no dead,” wrote Maeterlinck in The Bluebird.

In Blanchot we lose a great individualist and a great writer whose work is almost unknown but will never die He cannot be counted among the really dead.James Kirkup. Daniel Taradash, screenwriter: born Louisville, Kentucky 29 January 1913; married Madeleine Forbes (three children); died Los Angeles 22 February 2003. Daniel Taradash, who won an Oscar in 1953 for his screenplay of From Here to Eternity, was noted for his skilful adaptation of literary and theatrical works. Many had considered From Here to Eternity, with its racy content and criticism of the army, to be unfilmable, but Taradash, a lawyer who never practised law, fashioned a screenplay that satisfied both the military and the censors. His other screenplays included Golden Boy, which made William Holden a star, Rancho Notorious, Desir? Picnic and Bell, Book and Candle. His sole effort as a director, Storm Center, was the most outspoken attack on McCarthyism to appear in the 1950s.